Friday, 29 June 2012

Chocolate tarts - work in progress

I told you yesterday about my chocolate tarts disaster. So here they are as I found them straight out of the oven. What a waste of all that lovely filling! Pastry has never been my strength in the kitchen but I really shouldn't have attempted to bake with it on a day when anything that could go wrong did go wrong. I wouldn't be sharing this at all except that I actually liked them the next day and think there may be some potential in the recipe.

I had some leftover pastry and leftover condensed milk and got a notion into my head to make chocolate tarts with it. I was very tempted to adapt this Creamy Peanut Butter Pie, if only because it was such a sweet story of a wife making it to remember her husband Mikey who died suddenly. But I kept being intrigued by Minnie's Chocolate Pie made by Katie at Apple and Spice.

However I take all the blame for the disaster. Katie did warn readers not to substitute condensed milk for evaporated milk. But condensed milk is just sweetened evaporated milk and I really wanted to make the pie to use some of my leftover condensed milk. And to eat chocolate! I then swithered over baking times and filled the pastry cases too much. I knew they were too full but I wanted to use all the filling. Which dripped all over my oven as well as the fairy cake tins.

My pastry was nicely cooked and even a little flaky. The filling, however, lacked the sticky sludgy smoothness of Katie's photos. Maybe I should have made the large pie rather than individuals. My pies were almost cakey. They were even a bit tasteless straight out of the oven. The next day we loved them. These are pies that are far better cool. They are also very portable if you just so fancy one for morning tea at the office. All in all, these were not a bad disaster (unless you had to do the washing up).

1 heaped tbsp butter (I used margarine), melted
100ml condensed milk
3 tbsp cocoa
1 egg
pinch salt
1/2 tsp vanilla (I didn't use but might do if I did this again)
Pastry - I think I had about 1/3 of this yoghurt pastry

Roll out pastry and line some muffin tins (next time I would use deeper holes like muffins rather than in the tin I used). Mix remaining ingredients together and spoon into pastry cups, leaving some room at the top for the filling to expand. Bake at 200 C for about 30 minutes. (I think the filling needs less time, I am not sure if the pastry would be ok with less time. I toyed with blind baking but I wasn't sure.)

18 comments:

a valiant effort!! and I'm with you, it doesn't have to be "pretty" to still taste outrageous! The things we do for chocolate, right? :) haha I still think they look delicious, and would love to enjoy one right about now!

Isn't it funny the way fillings can vary so much in how they turn out? Looking at the ingredient list I can see how the filling could go cake-y, but on looking at Katie's ingredients they weren't so very different. As it is, though, your tarts still appeal to me, and one advantage of explosions in baked goods is that there's justification for keeping them all to yourself :)

Thanks Kari - I thought about making these tarts for quite some days before I made them and I think I swithered as I worried they wouldn't bee as gooey as katie's - am very glad I didn't plan to share these with anyone - definitely not for company :-)

Thanks Hannah - it seems my winter of pastry - though it just seems lots of experiments and not quite feeling at home with the stuff yet! am sure peanut butter would go well - my other plan was to mix condensed milk, cashew butter and chocolate and adding it after the pastry cooked -would have been softer and probably messier

Pastry has never been my strength one of my fortes either Johanna and if I ever tempted to make such a tart it would surely be uneatable. But, as the Cake Crusader said, "Taste is everything" and that's really all that matters. I'm sure you will continue to perfect these Chocolate Tarts to your liking but I'll just take one as it is, lol...

Oh dear. Sometimes substituting ingredients can work, other times it's a disaster. I hate that. And as well you have all the mixture burnt onto your oven. Not a good day in the kitchen! Well, we've all had days like that! xx

Thanks Charlie - I am always gung-ho with substituting ingredients because I am loathe to buy a new ingredient if I have something close enough for jazz! We do all have days like that which are forgotten after a bit of scrubbing :-)

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Recipes and reflections in which our vegetarian heroine dreams of being tall and graceful as a giraffe; being a goddess in the kitchen; and being gladdened by green gadgets, green food and green politics because green is the colour of hope. See About Me for more info.